Word: lerner
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Amid the confusion walked the two men who had started it, and who must end it in the next three weeks. Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe, said Julie Andrews, "are the loneliest men in town." Acting as their own producers, with $3,000,000 of other people's money and their own reputations to safeguard, they have to worry about everything from the color of Julie Andrews' hair (too light) to King Pellinore's visor (will not fall shut on cue) to the inner mists of the Arthurian theme...
Shut away in the Ritz-Carlton, Lerner fills Apartment 1004 with cigarette smoke and new lines for Camelot. Across the hall in another suite, his two-year-old son Michael listens to a phonograph not Lerner and Loewe, but Au Clair de la Lune. Up in 1204, Loewe ("Sir Aggravate," as Lerner nicknames him) broods under the fond eye of his current, 24-year-old girl friend; he calls her "baby boy," she calls him "baby bear." For hours each day, Lerner joins Loewe at the piano as they work together on four new songs, including one called The Seven...
...Knights. Frederick ("Fritz") Loewe is Viennese, emotional, a flamboyant gambler who thinks the second biggest thrill on earth is to drop $30,000 in a single night at the casino tables, then tell about it for weeks. Alan Jay Lerner is cool, self-controlled and self-censored, a planner who will not even put money in his own shows because, as he firmly explains, "I don't bet." Loewe likes to recall that he "starved" for 20 years; Lerner has always been wealthy. Short, lean, with the sallow skin of the heart patient, Loewe is 59 and looks it; about...
...Lerner is a fastidious dresser whose clothes are always neat and perfectly cut, with a rococo touch here and there. Loewe is a bit rumpled, his predilections turning more to wine, women, and when the need arises song. Lerner smokes, and has a habit of twirling the ignited cigarette in his fingers like the active end of a turboprop. Loewe has given up smoking, but when the jade palls he constantly keeps an unlit cigarette in his hand, gradually flattening and shredding it as he talks. He pinches away a pack a day, recently changed brands...
Psychologists might note that neither had any fondness for his mother, and that both have wildly unstable relationships with women. But Loewe is mockingly uninterested in psychoanalysis, while Lerner believes in it strongly, has had a pride of analysts. Loewe professes not to worry about his health, while Lerner is a bit of a hypochondriac, makes a fetish of weighing himself daily; he buys a new scale wherever he goes, probably owns the largest collection this side of the Office of Weights and Measures. Loewe has hated the telephone ever since he answered it once when...